Daniel's World of Coffee

Cool New Sample Roaster

I got the chance to play around on a cool new sample roaster today. The machine is manufactured by Taehwan, in Korea. The brand name is the Proaster.

Proaster had a shop roaster up and running at the Roaster's Guild retreat in Oregon last week. They already offer larger batch roasters. This week they paid a visit to Boot Coffee in California and helped install this two-barrel sample roaster.

Good-looking machine. It took only a couple of hours to hook up the gas and electricity. The machine is surprisingly light, but as you can see below, the actual machining and manufacturing is high-quality. Below you can see the interior of the machine, viewed from behind with the back panel taken off.

The batch capacity for each barrel is anywhere from 100 grams to 200 grams. That's a good size for sample roasting, as you typically receive 300 or 350 grams per sample from a producer or importer.

We had a bit of trouble calibrating the thermocouples exactly, but that's hardly a surprise considering the thing was shipped all the way from Korea. In general, it was a pleasant experience roasting on this machine. Even the "bad" batch of coffee (the first roast we tried, with miscalibrated temperature readings, which went too fast overall) turned out with a nice flavor in the cup.

Many roasters who are just starting up their businesses agonize over how to deal with sample roasting. A shop roaster can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Few companies can afford to invest another $8,000 - $15,000 on a sample roaster. The Proaster sample roaster is priced significantly lower (though still not cheap!) and so far the results have been very nice. Of course, it will take more time to reach a completely-informed opinion. But so far, so good!

Sometimes it's the little things that can make a difference. This machine has an innovative design for the doors that allow for discharging the beans. When the machine is empty, you can look inside and see the interior design of the drum. Pretty cool.

We turned some students loose on this machine, just throwing them into the deep end of the pool, and (smart people) they were able to come up with some pretty well-developed sample roasts right off the bat.

Advanced Roasting Fun

Here's a video I took this afternoon... a sunny August afternoon in Northern California. This is day two of a three day Advanced Roasting Techniques class I am teaching at Boot Coffee.

There are three groups going here, one on a 1 pound San Franciscan roaster (the red one), one on a 5 kilo Probat from 1948 (the black one), and one on a three barrel Gothot sample roaster (the silver one). Each team has a different task to complete, using green coffee from the stock of dozens of different coffees Boot Coffee has in its lab.

Tomorrow morning we are going to cup the results (27 coffees!) and have each team interpret and defend the results of their experiments.

Roasting at Origin Article

I've got a short article in the March issue of Fresh Cup magazine. It's not available online, but for those of you in the coffee industry, you should be reading Fresh Cup anyway!

It's for the "Roaster's Realm" column, and I wrote about roasting quality coffee at origin. Often you can't get very well-roasted coffee in producing countries. There's some striking irony when you are surrounded by lovely, green, growing coffee trees and drinking a cup of something that's diner quality at best.

But things are changing. I interviewed three quality-oriented roasters I have worked with in three different countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Puerto Rico), and came up with some interesting results. Check it out.

Panama Course: Crafting Quality at Origin

I just want to give a heads up to those of you that follow this blog: I'm teaching a course in Panama in March of 2011.

This is for folks who are damn serious about their coffee businesses and their coffee careers. The world's most unique coffee education course, among the coffee farms and cloud forests of Panama. A truly unforgettable learning experience that will launch you into the next level (and possibly several more levels beyond that).

This course is five days of intensive coffee education amid the splendor of coffee farms growing along a nature preserve in the volcanic cloud forests of Panama. It's as beautiful as it sounds.

And by the way, March is absolutely the month you want to be in the mountains of Panama. Warm and sunny without being humid. Cool breezes among the trees and mountainsides... it's paradise. The farm we are staying at is surrounded by nature preserves, and serves as a stopover for dozens of different tropical and migratory birds. In fact, they get annual groups of ornithologists that come and stay in these cabins.

But this is no idle sightseeing trip. We'll be studying intensively the workings of a coffee farm, with a special eye towards how quality is crafted. Course topics include:

• • Introduction to Sensory Analysis
• • Intensive Tasting Exercises
• • Coffee Tasting Training and Triangulation
• • Applied Roasting Theory
• • Hands-on Roasting Sessions
• • The Workings of a Coffee Farm
• • Tours of High Altitude Specialty Coffee Farms
• • Theory of Growing Coffee
• • Coffee Processing Up Close and Personal
• • Environmental and Social Sustainability
• • Buying Coffee for Your Business
• • Developing Relationships with Growers

Finally I should mention too that March is the end of the harvest season in Panama. We will have dozens upon dozens of fresh-crop, unsold specialty coffees on site for roasting and cupping. It would be great to see some of you blog-readers in Panama, but space is very limited, of course.

There's a website about the class here. Or you can send me an email to [email protected]

Roast Profiling and Cupping

For the next three days I am in Marin County, California, teaching a class at Boot Coffee Consulting. The course is called Roast Profiling and Cupping. It combines information on sensory analysis, heat-transfer dynamics, and artisan roasting techniques.

The first day of this class begins with, well, coffee of course. Once everyone's acclimated to the lab, where we have several different sample roasters, brewing equipment, an AV set-up, cupping lab, coffee library, etc, we start with a lot of theory. What's the difference between convection, conduction, and radiation when it comes to the development of coffee during the roasting process? How does processing affect the way beans of different densities absorb heat?

Then we dive right into sensory analysis. We do sessions with nuts, dried fruits, chocolates, apples of different acidity levels and sweetness levels, fruits with different kinds of mouthfeel. All this is leading into the really important stuff: the sensory analysis of coffee. Cupping, that is.

We cover cupping vocabulary, cupping protocols, cupping technique, and we do LOTS of triangulation exercises to put people through their paces. And that's all just day one.

Day two and day three involve a lot more theory, but mainly it's about roasting and cupping, and roasting and cupping, and roasting and cupping. I teach or help teach this class several times each year. We have roasters from all over the world come to learn and practice. This class has folks from California, New York, Wisconsin, Seattle, Massachusettes, Australia, and Singapore.

This week we set up a canopy outside because of the heat in Northern California. Students are starting to arrive right now as I type this. Time to go!

A Special Kind of Hotness

Part three of my videos in Panama, featuring the beautiful Tesse, the adorable Tiborcito, Daniel being way too excited to be crossing the Panama Canal, and a place that attracts bird-watchers and entomologists from all over the world.

Be sure to watch part one and part two.

Incidentally, I'm quite serious about organizing a trip to Ojo de Agua. We are looking at the week of January 3rd or January 10. I will of course post more about that if it's happening, but if you want to get at the top of the list, send me an email at [email protected].

Just to give you an idea of where all this is, I've included a map. The marker here is for the town of Volcán. Just to the northeast, you can see the large volcano. On the far side of the volcano is Finca Sofia (featured in the earlier videos, and quite close to the place shown in this video). Just north of that, shrouded in clouds in this Google Map view, is a vast protected forest land called Palo Seco. The farm lies right up against this protected zone, surrounded, in fact, on three sides by protected forest land.

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Jeremy Explains his Non-burning Afterburner

I'm in California to teach a roasting course and host a cupping. But in the meantime here's a little video from my trip last week to Portland with Sarah Dooley. We were putting on a cupping of Ethiopian coffees for the local specialty coffee roasters. Jeremy Adams of Cellar Door Coffee Roasters was kind enough to let us use his space. After the cupping he showed us his new baby, a Diedrich IR-12 roaster. To cut down on smoke without installing an expensive and carbon-hungry afterburner, Jeremy installed this cool scrubbing system instead.

Check it out... the videos a little shaky, but if you stick around till I get my camera in the right spot, you can see the super-fine particulate mist he's talking about.

Coffee Roasting and Cupping Courses in California

Before I headed off to Ethiopia in March, I went to Mill Valley, California, where I often go. That's where the laboratory of Boot Coffee Consulting is. I do lots of work with Boot Coffee. It's a pretty unique operation. Basically, this is super high-end coffee education.

For the last few years I have helped teach the classes in the laboratory there, specifically cupping and roasting courses. I'm now often the lead instructor for the Intro level courses. If you have ever read this blog and thought about taking some coffee courses, you should think about coming to one of our Roast Profiling & Cupping courses. I'm teaching one in May and another in June, but Boot Coffee offers them year round.

Students always remark on what a great class it is. There's a great blend of technical information, theoretical instruction, and hands-on work. I've had people who worked in the industry 10 years come to one of these and leave by remarking how much they learned in just three days. But we also get beginners all the time. After one course they are already way ahead of the game.

We always make great friends, and the setting in Marin County, California, is beautiful and peaceful.

For instance, this picture is from a class I taught this past winter. The middle two gentlemen, Rick and Daniel, were passionate coffee lovers but had not really worked in the industry much. Flash forward a couple of months... I just ran into each of them at the trade show in Los Angeles, where they were cupping fresh crop micro-lots by the dozen; coffees that many professionals never get the chance to experience. These guys are hard core!

So I was down in California doing this stuff before I went to Ethiopia, and I will be back there again soon. In our next installment: off to Africa.

Fresh Crop El Salvador Cupping

Hello from Marin County, California. Yesterday we roasted over 40 samples of fresh crop El Salvador coffees and weighed out cups. This morning we got up extra early to do a preliminary selection cupping of the 40+ samples. We picked out 16 exemplary lots, bourbons and pacamaras, washed and honey process. Some friends at Bay Area super specialty roasters came over and cupped them more fully with us.

These are very young, very fresh coffees. All micro-lots, specially selected in El Salvador by Graciano Cruz. 30 bags maximum exist of each of these coffees. They are super high-grade coffees that in the past were getting mixed together and lost at the exporter level. We're doing some really exciting work to keep them separated out and offered to roasters like these folks who will give them the TLC they deserve. There are a ton more honey process coffees on the way too, but they are still being processed at this point.

Thanks to everyone who came by.

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Ethiopia for the Cupping Caravan in Harar. More on that to come!

First Crack and the Little Firecrackers of Heat

When roasting coffee, the time between first crack and second crack, or first crack and the end of the roast (whichever comes first), is the critical phase that determines the flavor of the coffee. During this time, sugars and other compounds in the coffee bean cells are undergoing Maillard Reactions, which is essentially caramelizing. If you blast through this stage too quickly, the coffee will get burnt without ever developing sweetness. If you don't go far enough into this stage the coffee will be sour and underdeveloped, and lacking sweetness.

Whether you are looking for a light roast or a dark roast, it's absolutely critical that you do what you can to extend the Roast Development time.

The hard part, though, is that right at the first crack, the beginning of roast development, the beans go into an exothermic reaction. Where they had been absorbing heat from the roasting environment, now suddenly they are giving off heat to the environment like little exploding firecrackers. This raises the overall temperature of the environment, and tends to make whip you right through the Roast Development time faster than you wanted.

In order to compensate for this moment, anticipating the beginning of the first crack, it's a good idea for a roaster to back off the heat supply of the machine coasting into the first crack just right.

There's a lot more to it than that, of course. But that gives you an idea of the kind of thing we are talking about in my course this week.